Why Gartner's blog estimates are shortsighted.

Not very long ago Gartner Group chief fellow Daryl Plummer predicted that blogging would reach an apex of about 100 million bloggers worldwide around June 2007 and then level off. I think he's showing about the same amount of vision as The New York Times did over a century ago when it declared that all things that needed to be invented had been. History has not been kind to that vision--or lack of it.

The crystal-ball game is fun. Hell, I predicted the Red Sox would beat the Cubs in the last World Series. It was merely wishful thinking. I don't know what Hummer was wishing for, but I'll bet my salary against his that his predicted numbers for bloggers will be far short of the reality.

Personally, I think head count is a misleading way to calculate the importance of blogging as a new communication medium and business tool. Since I cannot balance my own checkbook, I'll admit I'm not the best of numbers guys. But just for fun let's crunch a few:

* Technorati is the most cited source, saying there are currently more than 55 million bloggers worldwide.

* Technorati doesn't count private bloggers. Mena Trott, CEO of the online community Six Apart, says haft of their bloggers are private. That's about another 10 million.

* No one's sure how many bloggers are in China. Low estimates say 50 million. High estimates make it 200 million.

* I couldn't easily find numbers for bloggers at the world's two largest consumer blogging sites--MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360--but I think that a guess of more than 35 million would be safe.

So now we're at 300 million bloggers. But wait, there's more. There's this phenomenon called MySpace. It has 85,000 new registrations daily. Prediction says that MySpace will be 200 million strong by year-end.

But MySpace, you might say, is just kid stuff, so why bother counting it? Let's assume MySpace is populated mostly by people under age 25. Are they relevant to business and communication people?

They are your future customers, employees and competitors. They are part of a new online generation. If Plummer really wants to predict what is going to happen in coming years, he should look at people who will come of age and enter the workforce.

This emerging generation gets its information from online resources, of which blogging is the most prominent form. They trust each other as sources. They don't read newspapers, watch television or listen to radio. They have remarkable resistance to marketing messages, particularly advertising.

That generation is now developing some of the relationships and habits that will stay with them through life. These relationships and habits will affect their workplace behavior. As members of my generation avidly cling to newspapers and network TV for information, and are driving off to Jurassic Park, our office seats will be filled by the emerging online generation. And there will be far more of them than 100 million.

What I do think will happen in 2007, or at least what I hope will happen, is that people will stop obsessing about the numbers of bloggers and instead start to understand that it has become a credible source of information for uncountable millions of people, many of whom probably don't realize they are reading blogs. We have entered a conversational era; blogging is currently the most popular of its power tools.

Blogging is entering a phase of normalization. More people are talking less about them and using them more. This year, my prediction is that counting the number of blogs will start to become as mundane as counting the number of e-mails, instant messages or phone conversations.

This is as it should be as a leading-edge technology continues to swim into the mainstream of personal and business communication.

Shel Israel writes and consults on blogging and social media. He is coauthor, with Robert Scoble, of Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. He is currently working on a second book, Global Neighborhoods: How Social Media Moves Power from Institutions to Communities.

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